Zing Go the Strings
Precocious or pretentious, this guy's a winner.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS
With Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson
Written and directed by David Gordon Green

SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE of All the Real Girls, the new movie from the gifted young director who made George Washington, the almost accidentally charming Paul - who's slept with every eligible young woman (save one) in his small, rural, North Carolina industrial town - tells a disquieting story about a mistake of nature: One night not long ago, he watched a V-formation of migrating geese fly smack into the side of a barn and fall to the ground dead, every last one of them.

Paul uses this story to describe himself after his life-altering relationship with Noel (Zooey Deschanel) goes south. She's the one whom Paul (Paul Schneider) hasn't slept with, a quiet girl, still a virgin - with an anxious sexuality, and home now from boarding school to work in the textile mill - who has already told him: "You're the first person I've ever wanted to talk to for more than five minutes - ever."

And it's no wonder. The people in their town know things - about trombones and carbohydrates, feng shui and car engines - but don't really have very much to say. They hang out, pick their teeth, sleep with each other, raise their families and, for fun, race cars around a muddy track. That's another metaphor, one of at least a dozen you can count in David Gordon Green's beautiful little movie.

All the Real Girls is wonderful, small, independent cinema: intelligent, confident, patient, heartbreaking and thoroughly self-aware, which is to say, more than a little self-conscious. From the dog that walks on its front legs because it has no back feet, to Paul's mother (Patricia Clarkson), an unhappy middle-aged woman who works as a hospital clown, and who unfurls her repressed hostility in full clown makeup (one of several moments where Green's heavy hand goes too far), All the Real Girls appropriates the discourse of romantic and existential cliché and makes it eerily alive again, coming from a culture whose humanity we easily overlook.

So yes, All the Real Girls is sociology as well as a drama, and Green's social studies may even be more perceptive than his love story. In George Washington, Green (born in Texas, educated in North Carolina) took us to a biracial Southern town where people lived harmoniously enough to have problems that transcended race. But this time he eschews the complexity of race for more ethereal matters: understanding love, and salvaging your humanity.

All the Real Girls opens on Paul and Noel negotiating a kiss and the trouble it will bring: Paul's best friend is Tip, Noel's older brother, who will surely explode when he learns that the town's Priapian conqueror is bird-dogging his sister. Paul lost his virginity at 13 to an older woman who immediately dumped him, and Tip confides that despite having slept with dozens of woman himself, he's never spent a full night in bed with one.

These characters clearly have issues born of class and culture, and you never really get the sense that their lives will change very much, despite how desperately they want to figure themselves out. When Noel says she's not sure if she wants to go to college "to write bad-girl poetry," you can't even tell if she does write poetry. She's talking more about a world she imagines that one she actually inhabits.

Green rewards us in All the Real Girls with material that's simple and maybe even pointedly banal - or, some will surely feel, precious and contrived. His exceptional actors speak their dialogue like halting amateurs, but you know they're not. (The famous Mali Finn was Green's casting agent.) And while their soliloquies and conflicts feel comfortably improvised, I suspect Green wrote his script down to the last word. His images ramble and resonate, their reality both heightened and softened by the director's lithe, naturalistic visual style. It's real life writ small, only with big ideas, dressed up in metaphor like the pretty girl with too many ribbons in her hair, and photographed to evoke the elegiac Terrence Malick, the Texas philosopher whose three movies are unique works of American iconography.

Green's little unexplained extras and epiphanies - a Down's Syndrome child; an adopted, seemingly mixed-race girl who has abandonment dreams - add to his story's emotional fabric. His discreet sex scenes are erotic and tactile, and his astute final image - a row of buildings, their reflections quivering on the river like an impressionistic watercolor - makes literal his movie's interest in cinematic naturalism.

In the final passage of All the Real Girls, Green becomes somewhat overwhelmed by his creation, employing a series of epilogues and codas that seem to want to out-charm, out-feel and out-metaphor one another, just at the point where he should have turned concrete. He leaves the future ambiguous, a common choice in serious films, so it has no special resonance. And anyhow, you know a guy like Paul will be okay when you see him standing in the river up to his waist, trying to teach his scruffy, symbolic mutt to swim.